Follow the Drinking Gourd:
A Cultural History

Collection Story

It is doubtful if any thing more novel than H.B.
Parks' 'Follow the Drinking Gourd' has ever been printed in the realm of
American folklore...

J. Frank Dobie, from the Preface to Foller de
Drinkin' Gou'd

H.B. Parks

This version collected in 1912 (Hot Springs, North
Carolina), 1913 (Louisville) and 1918 (Waller, Texas). Published in 1928.

Follow the Drinking Gourd was first published in 1928 by
the Texas Folklore Society. It was "discovered" by H.B. Parks, a Texas
entomologist who was also an amateur folklorist. The Parks article claims that
an Underground Railroad operative, known as Peg Leg Joe, moved from plantation
to plantation just north of the Mobile, Alabama area working as a journeyman
laborer. This work was a front for Joe's true task: teaching slaves the
Drinking Gourd song and marking an escape route.

Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, Number VII, Austin,
1928

H.B. (Harris Braley) Parks,
1879-1958

The song ostensibly encodes escape instructions and a
map from Mobile, Alabama up the Tombigbee River, over the divide to the
Tennessee River, then downriver to where the Tennessee and Ohio rivers
meet in Paducah, Kentucky. (Map adapted from the Educator's Guide to Follow the
Drinking Gourd, 1995.) The "drinking gourd" is a code name for the
Big Dipper star formation, which points to Polaris, the Pole Star, and
North.

According to Parks, he heard the song three times:
first in North Carolina in 1912, then Louisville around 1913, and Texas
in 1918. The lyrics were explained to him by yet another person in
Texas. All of his informants were black.

A Clever Fabrication?

There has been
speculation (1)
for decades that the song was
a clever fabrication. No other map songs survive to the present. Also,
aside from Parks's account, there seemed little other evidence of a song
that ranged from North Carolina to Kentucky to Texas. It has never been
found in its home territory of Alabama, and Alabama was extensively
researched by local song collectors and many outsiders. In other words,
one amateur folklorist accidentally hears three different versions of
the song in an area comprising almost one hundred thousand square miles,
while no one else appears to collect it anywhere. The article is also
the first instance I have found of "drinking gourd" used as a coded
synonym for the Big Dipper. It doesn't appear in any of the period
newspapers or slave testimonies I've searched.

At this point, the song could still have been considered folklore  a
curious tale, perhaps based on a historical person, but not necessarily
"history." But in his article, Parks claims to have written to a
great-uncle who explained the song and confirmed the existence of Peg
Leg Joe. Parks's only grandchild told me that according to family lore,
both sides of the family were involved in the Underground Railroad.
I have confirmed that Parks's maternal
great-uncle, Dr. Harris Cowdry, served as a Vice President of the
New England Anti-Slavery Society, from 1840 to 1848.
(2)

But by the time Parks says he heard the song, both Cowdry and his son were
dead. In fact, Cowdry died in 1875, four years before Parks was born.
It's very unlikely that someone from Parks's grandparents' generation survived
long enough to assist him in his research.
(3)
This makes it quite unclear who (if anyone) from his family might have actually
confirmed the story.

The Case for the Defense

There is no reason to deny it except for its improbability, and
that is a
poor argument, since history is full of the improbable.

Barry Strauss, The Battle of Salamis: The Naval
Encounter
That Saved Greece  and Western Civilization.

In Parks's defense, he had extraordinary powers of observation. He was
completely at home in a non-white setting, from years spent in Alaska among
Native Americans. Parks had doubtless grown up with family stories of the
Underground Railroad and could have been attuned to clues that eluded most other
southern whites of the time. (Although this very family background might also
have made him more credulous, seeing Underground Railroad connections where
perhaps there were none!)

To publish a completely fraudulent account would have entailed deceiving
quite a number of colleagues, including famed Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie.
Parks's academic career might not have been over had he been caught, but
it would have done it no good either. All this seems dramatically out of
character for Parks.

But when I asked his granddaughter specifically about whether Parks might
have contacted a great-uncle, she noted dryly that he "liked to sit around and
talk." My hunch is that Parks added the story about his great-uncle's
confirmation in order to give his account considerable added credibility. He wouldn't be the first historian or folklorist of the late 19th
and early 20th century to embellish an account. With the benefit of hindsight,
any embellishment seems unnecessary. The core collection story remains a
remarkable account of an interested white stranger trying to draw out
understandably wary black informants during the height of the Jim Crow era in
the South.

Luckily for anyone trying to make sense of this song's history, there are two
other possible sources, Lee Hays and Randy Sparks. And one likely detour!

Lee Hays

As for me, I figure the song was wending its way through (the)
'folk process', passed through Lee's door for a night and a good meal
and then went on its way.

Fred Hellerman of The Weavers, personal communication.

This version collected ca. 1920, supplemented with lyrics from the Parks
version, most likely sourced from the 1934 Lomax book. Published in 1947 and
first recorded in 1951.

In
1947, Lee Hays published an arrangement of Drinking Gourd
in the People's Songs Bulletin, where he wrote a monthly column. Hays is best
known as a member of both the Almanac Singers and the Weavers.

According to the notes to a Weavers recording, while a child Hays "used to
visit Negro churches and sit in the back pew, and he used to visit the homes of
Negro farmers, soaking up the richest musical sounds and harmonies that have
ever come our way."

He may also have heard black music at home. In an undated letter to Pete
Seeger, Hays says he learned parts of the song from his elderly black "nurse",
Aunty Laura, while a child. According to 1920 census records, Lee Hays was six
years old and living in Forrest City, Arkansas  that's about 150 miles due west
from the source of the Tombigbee. Pete Seeger wrote me that the melody
came from Aunty Laura, while the lyrics originally came from anthologies
 most likely the Parks version reprinted in a Lomax songbook in 1934 (see
here.) I'll note
in passing that Hays never mentioned Aunty Laura to his biographer, Doris Willens, and she cautioned me that Hays was a "fabulist."

Hays assigned a previously unknown provenance to the song, holding that it
derived from a camp revival hymn, Follow the Risen Lord. While he did
research some of the Weavers repertory, most notably Wimoweh, I found
nothing in his papers at the Smithsonian describing where this information on
the Drinking Gourd might have originated. Separately, I have not been
able to find any trace of Follow the Risen Lord. And the original melodic
fragment in the Parks article doesn't follow hymn structure  instead it
suggests the African-American folk songs of that time.

Hays also claimed that the song conveys much more information than seems
possible in the version passed down to us. His introduction to one performance
asserts that the song, "told the slaves...when to go, what rivers to follow,
what mountains to pass over, what turnings to make, who to ask for..."
(Listen)►

Hays wrote that a song is "firstly and mostly poetry." In the service of
poetry and progressive politics, Hays polished and reworked the song, making
significant changes to the lyrics and possibly the melody, too.

Randy Sparks / John Woodum

I never heard such a song as Drinkin' Gourd before.

Randy Sparks

This version collected in 1955 (Shreveport, Louisiana); recorded in 1963.

In the fall of 1955, singer Randy Sparks was appearing in Shreveport,
Louisiana. During that engagement he heard a black street singer in his
seventies named John Woodum perform a version of the song. Sparks reported, "I
never heard such a song as Drinkin' Gourd before."

The lyrics Woodum sang were substantially different from either the Parks or
the Hays versions. The two earlier versions encode a map. The Woodum version is
inspirational  urging an escape  but contains absolutely no geographic
information. Woodum was the first known artist to use the lines, "Think I heard
the angels say, Stars in the heaven gonna show you the way" in the Drinking
Gourd song.

I have not been able to learn anything about Woodum in the census, Social
Security Death Index, or anywhere else. We are left to speculate how he
originally learned the song.

Carl Carmer  a likely detour?

In 1942, Carl Carmer published a version of the song in his book, America
Sings, oriented towards a children's audience. Carmer spent six years in
Alabama, so this might be an important variant collected from the field. I think
instead that it is a version of the Parks song which Carmer simplified for his
juvenile audience.

Mary (Hunter) Austin  earliest
reference of all?

The author Mary (Hunter) Austin (1868-1934) writes in her
autobiography Earth Horizon (published 1932) that as a girl of five or
six (ca. 1873), she heard a black man sing, "Foller de drinkin-gou'd!" in her
hometown of Carlinville, Illinois. It was sung by Moses Drakeford, who had been
the town's sole "colored man" in the pre-war period.
(4)
This is by far the earliest reference to the song I've uncovered. It's hard to
know whether to trust this very early, very fragmentary memory.

It's also very interesting (and puzzling?) that H.B. Parks'
hometown was also Carlinville. His mother Sarah Cowdrey Braley was born there in
early 1850. Austin and Parks both went to the local Blackburn College (she
graduated in 1888; he entered the Blackburn prep school five years later.)

Carlinville is just 2.4 square miles. "In 1853 the population was 790. In 1879
the population approximates closely to 5,000 souls." (1879 Macoupin Co.
history, page 86.) This tiny town certainly looms quite large in the song's
history!

I've included a summary of Census and other vital
information on Moses W. Drakeford in the Notes.
(5)